


Echoes

by Churbooseanon



Series: Starlight Challenges [13]
Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Role Reversal, F/M, M/M, POV Second Person, Things that just happened
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-19
Updated: 2015-06-19
Packaged: 2018-04-05 03:18:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,272
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4163682
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Churbooseanon/pseuds/Churbooseanon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Washington has a lot of time to think and remember post implantation. The things he remembers, though, the ghosts whose life he lives, may be changing him. He isn't even sure he cares. But it hurts, in a way, to love the man who ruined him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Echoes

**Author's Note:**

> AU where Allison is the basis for Alpha instead of Leonard. 
> 
> I can't even begin to explain how this happened.
> 
> For Starlight Challenge Prompt 5/18/2015: It was the most beautiful thing I would never see.

Things have been different since the Echo AI fragment was implanted, but really Washington, should you be surprised? In the moment between when Echo had become active in your head and the fragment starting to shatter in your mind, screaming in pain, you had almost wanted to laugh at how appropriate the designation had been. Sure, even now you get that it was the phonetic alphabet, just like the designations for the other fragments (though Wyoming had been pleased over Golf’s designation, for all that everyone else had just taken to calling the AI ‘G’), but that didn’t change the bitter resignation in that moment. 

Echo. No better name for the memories of a destroyed being, tearing through your mind like the screaming pain of a dying being. Going out not with a whimper or a shout, but curses at the world and the resolve to bring everything down around the two of you. 

But that was three years ago, Washington. So very, very long, and your life is so very, very different now. The walls around you are white, padded, one long mirror against another wall that is unbreakable. You know that, because you’ve tried more than a few times. In those moment where the temptation to follow Echo into the peaceful silence of oblivion had been overwhelming. Last time you tried was nearly a year and a half ago, but sometimes you consider just one more experiment. You know how it will go down to the tiniest detail, though, stuck in your head as data from previous attempts. That’s another gift Echo left you with. Perfect recall of all Echo knew. Perfect recall of everything since. A lot of the stuff before Echo, though? That’s all a blur. 

You know a lot about Project Freelancer, but most of what you know is through Echo’s eyes, and beyond that, the Alpha. You know what it is to have your mind stretched into what feels like the limitless depths of a ship of the line. Know what it’s like to think so deeply and so much that it slowly starts to fill up your finite amount of space, and you know what it’s like to know you have a very definite timer on your life. You know why Alpha was to be split. You know how. You know so much and so very, very little. 

And you know what will happen when you close your eyes, Washington, because it’s happened a hundred thousand times over, every time you’ve closed your eyes since Echo tore through your mind with blades of acid and glass and fire, destroying and melting and cauterizing all in one go so you can never truly heal again in your life. Echo flailed through your mind with ethereal hands ending in claws so sharp that you feel like they should have torn through your own skin and left physical scars instead of metaphorical ones. Then again, for all you know, there are scars in your brain matter, dead cells never to be recovered because of Echo’s rampage. 

But you close your eyes anyway, and in the peace of the moment, you open yourself up to the sensations that the ghosts of a ghost offers you. 

Because when you close your eyes, that’s when he comes. 

He’s younger than you know you should remember. The parts of you that still have some of Alpha know that face, older, tired, sad. Pained. But Washington, you don’t have too many memories of the Director yourself. Only what Echo gave you of a younger man, light in his eyes, a smile on his lips, and love in his heart. God you can see it when you remember how he looks at you. There is joy and longing and possession in that gaze, and you remember it rolling over your body like a touch. 

You rise to meet your ghostly lover, your arms up around his neck as you get up on your tiptoes to press a kiss to his lips. Light at first, and then deeper, hungrier, not angry but definitely possessive. He opens up beneath your attention, Washington, because he always does. Since you met he’s been putty in your hands and those hands rub now in his hair, against his scalp as his hands settle on your hips. 

Before you know it the two of you are stretched out on a bed, and his hands undress you both with a tenderness you know too well. Only you get touched like this, only you get to see how gentle your Leonard is. His lips on your neck, on your shoulders, leaving the lightest of marks down your chest and a quick flash of a tongue over your nipple and you gasp. 

When it first started, that part always jarred you awake. Echo, Alpha, Allison, none of them are Washington. They remember a different body, different bodies, different forms they possessed. A woman, a mother, a soldier who never had the advantages of full power armor and a team of the very best at her back. No, you aren’t even remotely Allison, a long dead woman that served at the basis of an AI for reasons you’ve never really understood. In a manner you never could figure out. Alpha never knew how she came to be, how it was possible for her to exist so long after the death of her originator. Perhaps she’d been flash-cloned before, memory mapped and just held dormant in storage. Washington doesn’t even know if that’s possible. 

But that was then, and this is now, and now, Washington, you don’t care that the body you remember as your own is hers. Smaller, leaner, softer in all the beautiful ways that women are. Because what you remember is always him, what you’re overwhelmed with is always Echo’s mournful love of the man who created her, Alpha’s devotional love to the man she worked with, and what the two of them remember of Allison’s love of her husband, the father of her child, the man she meant to come back to. 

His hands ghost over your hips, and you moan because his lips are far lower than that. He was always eager, you remember that Washington. Some small part of you, it wishes that you’d done the unthinkable during the Program. Hell, that you would do it now. But you don’t have the courage, Washington. Even if the Director were to visit here tomorrow, you don’t know that you could push him up against he wall and kiss him the way you remember kissing him. Make him moan and plead for you like you know he can and has. 

But that is Allison talking in your head. Allison through Alpha through Echo, and all you are to the Director is a failed experiment who went crazy and got locked in a box. 

So you close your eyes at night and remember the press of his tongue, the way he whispers to ask if you’re okay, the pleasure of pressing him down into the mattress below you and riding him. And always, always you remember the love in his eyes and the devotion in his words and the perfection of the moments spent together. 

When you wake up in the mornings, Washington, you have to remind yourself who you are. Try to draw the lines between you and her once more. It never works, but maybe, maybe someday. Maybe someday Echo and Alpha and Allison will just be her, and you will be you, and you won’t love the man who has ruined your life.

Maybe tomorrow. 

Maybe someday. 

Maybe never.


End file.
